All Chapters of Kill Me Once More, My Love : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

56 Chapters

Towards

Dorian's POV Four minutes is enough if none of it is wasted and he has not wasted a second since Marcus's two words hit his screen and he is already moving before Nadia finishes reading them over his shoulder because the elevator is the only way up and the only way down and four minutes means they are not taking the elevator.He goes to the kitchen and pulls the panel off the wall beside the refrigerator and behind it is a keypad he had installed three years ago when the nature of Ashvale Meridian's work made having a single exit point feel like the kind of oversight that gets people killed and he enters the six digit code and the panel beside it opens onto a maintenance corridor that runs the length of the residential floor and connects to a utility stairwell that exits at street level through a door that opens onto the east side of the building, which is the side Vael's asset is not covering.He looks at Nadia. She is already moving.Sable is two steps behind her and she is not as

North

Nadia's POVThe city is gone inside twenty minutes and the open road is ahead of them and she is sitting in the back seat of a car that does not belong to anyone she knows with her sister beside her and the man she came to destroy in the front passenger seat and none of that is the most significant thing happening right now which is that she is not afraid and she cannot remember the last time that was true when she was moving toward something instead of away from it.Sable is quiet beside her and the quiet between them is not the resolved kind and is not the unresolved kind either, it is the kind that belongs to two people who have said the significant thing and are sitting with the weight of it while the road moves under them and the city recedes and the thing that needs to be worked through between them exists in the space where it exists and will still exist when there is time to work through it properly and right now there is not that time and they both understand that without say

What The Property Holds

Dorian's POV Vael changed direction and the fragment is moving somewhere unknown and Dorian reads Marcus's message and does the calculation in the time it takes him to look up from the screen which is about four seconds and what the calculation produces is not panic and is not the managed containment of someone working within a framework someone else built for them but the specific clarity of a man who has spent fifteen years building a company around the skill of finding people who do not want to be found and understanding that a person who changes direction under pressure always moves toward something familiar.He looks at his father."Where would he go," he says.His father does not hesitate and does not ask for context and does not do any of the things a person does when they need the situation explained to them because he has been inside Vael's operational structure for thirty years and the question is one he has been prepared to answer for considerably longer than this morning.

Open

Nadia's POV She has known the fragment was there her entire life the way she has known her own heartbeat, present and constant and entirely unremarkable until the moment she turns her attention directly toward it, and turning her attention directly toward it is the thing she has never done because every Rememberer who documented soul fragment knowledge in the network files described the opening of a soul connection as the kind of action that cannot be undone once it starts and requires an anchor to pull you back when the transfer is complete or the connection does not close cleanly.She looks at the woman in the chair and the woman looks back and the knowledge transfer is not going to happen through language because the woman has not spoken anything recognizable since that first sentence in a dead dialect and the window Marcus described is not the kind that waits for a more convenient method to become available.She looks at Dorian."I need you to hold onto me," she says. "Not metapho

Split

Dorian's POV Vael following them to the anchor point is only a problem if they are trying to arrive without him knowing and they are not trying to do that anymore because the moment Nadia opens the connection and receives the architecture of how the anchor point comes apart the operational picture changes from a race to arrive first into something considerably more useful which is the specific advantage of a person who knows exactly what the other person is going to do before they do it and has built the response around that knowledge rather than against it.He looks at his father at the top of the staircase and his father looks back and he sees the moment his father understands what he is thinking because it moves across his face the way information moves across his own face, not slowly, the immediate recalibration of a man whose intelligence operates at the speed that makes other people feel like they are catching up rather than keeping pace, and Dorian understands looking at him

Vienna

Nadia's POV"Vienna," Nadia said, and the word sat in the car like something with weight.Nobody spoke for a full ten seconds. Sable was looking at her from the adjacent seat with that expression she got when she had already processed the worst version of something and was waiting to find out if the actual version was worse. The woman who built the anchor point was looking at the road ahead with the stillness of someone who already knew this and had been waiting for everyone else to catch up. Dorian turned from the front seat and looked at Nadia directly and his face was doing the open thing, no management, just him."The 1423 ballroom," he said."The building still exists," Nadia said. "I found it three years ago in the archive research. It has been through six different owners and four different functions since 1783 but the original structure is intact underneath the renovations." She looked at the road ahead. "I filed it under historical documentation and moved on because at the t

What Father's Know

Dorian's POV "Your father is already on a flight," Marcus said, and Dorian stopped walking in the middle of the private terminal and processed that for about two seconds before he understood that his father being already on a flight to Vienna was not a coincidence and was not a reaction to the information Dorian sent him twenty minutes ago because twenty minutes was not enough time to book and board and it meant his father had booked before anyone in that car said the word Vienna out loud.He had known.He had known and sent them to the stone property anyway and Dorian stood in the terminal with the operational picture rearranging itself around that single fact and thought about thirty years of a man working inside a system he was trying to dismantle from the inside and understood that the stone property was not just a safe house and was not just where the woman who built the anchor point had been kept and was specifically and deliberately the location his father needed them to reac

Thirty Thousand Feets

Nadia's POV "The passage is sealed," Dorian said, and he was not looking at the window or the seat in front of him, he was looking at her, turned sideways in the narrow plane seat with his arm on the rest between them and his voice low enough that the engine noise covered it from the seats behind where Sable and the woman were both asleep. "My father went to Vienna thirty years ago and got inside the building and found it and understood within sixty seconds of being in that room why Vael's predecessor sealed it in 1784.""What did he find," Nadia said."A room that amplifies everything," Dorian said. "The root anchor point does not just hold the entity's connection to the bloodline. It broadcasts it. Any soul in proximity to that room gets the interference whether they want it or not. In 1783 the ballroom above it was full of people experiencing things they could not explain and someone noticed and the passage was sealed to contain it."Nadia was quiet for a moment. Outside the smal

Landing

Dorian's POV"How long has it been doing that," Dorian said, and he was looking at the woman because the woman was the one who had an answer, not Nadia, Nadia was looking at her own chest with the expression of someone receiving information through a channel that did not have language attached to it yet.The woman sat forward in her seat and looked at the light with the attention of someone who had been waiting to see it for thirty years and was now checking it against what she remembered. "Since we crossed the border," she said. "The root anchor point has a radius. When the naming soul enters that radius the fragment activates." She looked at Dorian. "It has always done this. Every iteration. The entity learned to use it as a tracking mechanism.""Vael can locate us through it," Dorian said."He always could," the woman said. "In every previous lifetime he used the fragment's activation to find the Nadia soul and move against her before she reached the location." She paused. "He doe

The Property

Nadia's POV "Move," Dorian said, and they moved.Off the plane before the steps were fully extended, across the tarmac with the cold Vienna morning hitting their faces and the fragment burning steady against Nadia's sternum and the woman walking beside her with the specific speed of someone who has been waiting thirty years for exactly this morning and is not wasting a second of it now that it has arrived.Sable was on her other side with her hand wrapped around Nadia's arm and her bruised cheek and her jaw set and she had not said a single word since the plane touched down which meant she was in the mode she went into when she had made a decision and was executing it and Nadia had stopped trying to talk her out of things when she went into that mode seventeen years ago.A car was waiting at the edge of the tarmac. Marcus had arranged it from the city. The driver did not ask questions and Dorian gave the address and they were moving before the door was fully closed."Tell me what we

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